A mold or a tool is generally use d to produce a tangible item, such as a portion of a vehicle. Conventionally, a mold or tool has been produced by the use of a substantially solid block of material which is machined or “worked” to form the mold or tool. While this conventional procedure does produce an item having desirable features, it is inefficient and relatively costly.
One strategy to overcome these deficiencies involves the creation and use of a “soft” model of the desired tangible item to be created. Particularly, a soft model of the mold or tool is selectively created within Autocad® or some other type of computer aided design software, thereby allowing an intangible model of the mold or tool to be created. Intangible or soft portions or sections are formed from the software model and each of these intangible sections them become physically or tangibly manifested in respective sections or sectional members which are then typically and selectively joined together to cooperatively form the desired mold or tool. This approach is described, by way of example and without limitation, within U.S. Pat. No. 6,587,742 (“the '742 Patent”), which is owned by Applicants' assignee, and which is fully and completely incorporated herein by reference, word for word and paragraph for paragraph.
While the foregoing strategy does overcome the noted deficiencies of prior or conventional tangible entity creation methodologies, it may, due to certain tolerance variances associated with the material used to physically produce the sections and/or due to the actual construction and/or joining strategy, produce a tangible item having undesirable spatial features or qualities (e.g., the produced tangible item may lean or tilt or otherwise be spatially with the item which is desired to be produced) due to additive tolerance variances of each of the cooperatively joined sectional members (e.g., respective structural variances of each physically produced sectional members with the respective and corresponding softly modelled sectional members).
There is therefore a need for a new and improved method for producing a tangible item, such as a tool or a mold, which overcomes substantially all of the foregoing deficiencies and drawbacks of each of the various strategies and techniques. The present invention provides these and other benefits and represents a new and novel method for efficiently and accurately producing a mold or tool.